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IT Pro, Developer, Or Both?- The Results

For the past month I’ve been running a survey using Straw Poll to try and discover how my fellow IT Professionals and Developers see themselves. There’s a not very hidden DevOps elephant standing in the room somewhere, but I was careful not to use that term, or even mention “Ops” anywhere in the strawpoll or related blog post.

Here are the results

Interpret as you see fit, but here are some conclusions I’m drawing

Many people working in Computing see themselves as both an IT Pro and a Developer (a third of the respondents)- I take this to mean that in essence they are practising DevOps (at least in it’s most literal form) or otherwise see “Developer” being a subset of a more general “IT Professional” occupation.

“IT Professional” was possibly not the best term to use, one friend mentioned on twitter that he saw himself as a “Professional Developer”- a “Developer” vs “IT Professional” implying the non professionalism of the Dev. I suggested in this context perhaps the terms “IT Professional” and “Professional Coder” might be more suitable. Perhaps this is something to follow up in the future.

This was my first experience using the Straw application for a poll. It’s very straightforward to use, but I found I needed to work on advertising the poll if I was to get any respondents.